"The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets." – Whitfield Diffie

Goodreads

The Reality-Based Universe

I strongly believe that Hillary is the most qualified candidate for president.

– Peter Edelman, December 2015

What you won’t find in the catalog of complaints about Hillary Clinton’s supposed dishonesty is any such litany from people who have worked with her or for her. Peter Edelman, who has known Hillary since her collegiate days, quit the Clinton administration in outrage over the “welfare reform” bill. He doesn’t call her dishonest, nor in any way question her morals.

Nor does Theresa Loar, formerly Senior Coordinator for International Women’s Issues at the U.S. Department of State (1996-2001). “I honestly think Hillary Clinton wakes up every day thinking about how to improve the lives of women and girls. And I don’t know another world leader who is doing that,” she told Newsweek in 2011.

Many people who have worked with her have objected strongly to some of her policy beliefs and decisions, including Edelman and his wife, Marian. They’ve blistered her publicly for some of her decisions and statements. They have not, however, questioned her character.

During her term at State, she built an infrastructure to make women’s rights and children’s rights core elements of American foreign policy. This infrastructure implemented what became known as The Hillary Doctrine — “The subjugation of women is a threat to the common security of our world and to the national security of our country.”

Every trip Clinton made as Sec’y of State included in its itinerary an excursion out of the diplomatic bubble. She visited women’s shelters, orphanages, opposition newspapers or radio/TV stations. During the unrest in Egypt, she made an unannounced entry into a discussion forum at a popular Egyptian news site, and answered questions from all comers. Over three days, more than 6,000 Egyptians asked questions in the forum, eager to get a response from the American Sec’y of State. In Cambodia, she visited a shelter for victims of sex trafficking. The woman operating that shelter credited Clinton with getting the Cambodian government to take the trafficking seriously, saying Hillary Clinton “…by her work has saved many lives” of victims in Cambodia.

Those are facts. Facts. You can look them up. You can ask, “What do people who have worked with her, think of her?” You can look at the facts of her career. Or, you can continue in your ideological bubbles, fantasizing that one day a Clinton email will turn up in the Kremlin, so you can smugly declare, “I told you so.”